Stopping the damage caused by hidden biases

Wednesday

Apr 5, 2017 at 2:56 PMApr 5, 2017 at 2:56 PM

Speaking Out

In some occupational circles such as law enforcement, education and business, the term implicit bias has become familiar. Yet the vast majority of Americans haven’t a clue. They remain unaware that they unconsciously have negative attitudes toward a person or group of people based largely on stereotypes. Even worse, they act on them.

These attitudes are at the root of many of the systemic racial problems that persist in the Gainesville community and across the nation. They must be confronted.

This is why two of our five Gainesville for All teams — education and criminal justice — recently recommended implicit bias training as a step toward addressing the harm caused by this undercover form of discrimination.

Making people aware of their unconscious biases increasingly is being embraced by progressive-thinking companies such as Google and Facebook. It’s positive, too, that a growing number of institutions such as law enforcement and the criminal justice system, in general, are beginning to recognize the merit of such training.

The truth, however, is that institutions that have come under intense media scrutiny aren’t the only ones without clean hands. Data collected by experts such as those at Harvard University’s Project Implicit show that most, if not all of us, walk around with biases often formed by the way we were raised as children, mass media and our ever coarsening culture.

“It affects how we interact,” said Kate Ratliff, a psychologist at the University of Florida, who also is executive director of Harvard-based Project Implicit. “It can guide decision-making in hiring, medical treatment and law enforcement, for example.”

Let me be among the first to fess up to my implicit biases. Over the past year I grew fond of conversations with a new neighbor, who is white, until he posted a huge Trump sign not far from my driveway in his front yard. This happened last year during the presidential campaign and amid questions about Trump’s close ties to a white nationalist and his insistence that he didn’t know who the KKK’s David Duke is. Was I over-reacting when I became suspicious of my neighbor?

Then there are many times that I suspect I was the victim. I remember back in the late '80s when I was asked to represent the editorial board of the White Plains newspaper where I worked at candidate endorsement interviews in liberal, affluent, northern Westchester County, N.Y. As I scanned the crowd, a dozen or so white candidates milled around outside the meeting room unsure of who was going to interview them. Jaws dropped when I entered the room to begin the meeting. Implicit bias?

I could go on and on, but just one more: I’ll never forget the times taxi drivers passed me by in mid-town Manhattan despite my valiant taxi-hailing skills. They almost always stopped to pick up whites sometimes less than a block away.

It’s certainly true that implicit bias is a universal phenomenon that isn’t restricted to race. Unconscious prejudices surface all the time in matters of gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, age and religion, to name some. But it is indisputable that many of these victims have seen fast-paced progress in removing structural barriers.

Not so much for many African-Americans. A recent special report published in The Sun found that black defendants were more likely to be given harsher sentences than white defendants for the same crime. The report linked implicit bias among those who work in the criminal justice system as a possible cause.

Now consider that Project Implicit, which offers an online computerized implicit bias test at implicit.harvard.edu, has tabulated that a whopping 70 percent of its millions of test-takers showed some degree of preference for white people over black people.

That statistic alone should be enough to compel implicit bias training for everyone. It’s why GNV4ALL has asked UF to help design a training program that can be rolled out to all segments of the Gainesville community. We’re particularly pleased that Ratliff agreed to work with us.

But most important, we need your buy in to stop the damage that hidden biases are causing. Together, let’s face it to fix it.

— James F. Lawrence is director of GNV4ALL. He can be reached at gnv4all@gmail.com.